MAUVE's the word!

Sunny Today you can ask - 'Does this colour or that colour suit me?' - 'this red?' or 'this green?' or 'this purple?' Our world is multi-coloured and almost unlimited colours are available to many of us most of the time, in a myriad of fabrics. Our forefathers did not have this luxury. Until recent times, clothes and furnishings were dyed with mainly plant dyes - colours that were therefore limited to earthy reds, blues, yellows and greens, along with browns and blacks. It was a very special dye that did not fade after a few weeks!

Dyes from animal sources were also used, and these tended to be extremely expensive. For example, purple was extracted from the glandular mucus of snails - not only difficult to extract, but also very expensive. Purple was therefore a colour of wealth and privilege, associated with royalty and the higher echelons of the Church. Take the Imperial Emperors of Ancient Rome, purple was a colour worn ONLY by the Emperor and his household and its use was forbidden elsewhere.

Chance events can completely alter the course of history, and one such event took place in the Summer of 1856. A young student called William Perkin was working at The Royal College of Chemistry in London. He was trying to synthesise the drug, Quinine, from coal tar. The result of his work was a black residue - not what he wanted at all! He was on the point of discarding this residue, but he decided to add liquid to it. The solution that resulted was 'Strangely beautiful' - MAUVE had made its debut! When William Perkin further discovered that this new solution would stain cloth, this entrepreneurial young man took out a patent and contacted a dye-works with his new product.

Whilst the origin of the modern industrial revolution is often traced to the Ironbridge Gorge northwest of Birmingham in the UK, less credit is given to one of the birthplaces of the modern organic chemical industry. William Henry Perkin (1838-1907) who at the age of 18 had set out with idea of making quinine (C20H24N2O2) by oxidising allytoluidine (C10H12N), had accidentally produced instead the first ever synthetic dye (aniline purple, better known as mauveine (actual formula of principal component C26H23N4+X-, X= sulphate, acetate etc). It is worth noting that molecular structure of few compounds were known with certainty at this time, and even that of benzene had only recently been recognised by Kekule.

Coal The coal tar that was his raw material was in plentiful supply, as it was a waste product of the gas lighting in the streets of London. It was available in vast quantities, at very little cost. Perkin and his father built a factory and went into the production of mauve cloth. At this point, another chance of history favoured Perkin. The Empress Eugenie of France had eyes of an unusual colour. She saw the mauve cloth, decided that it matched her eyes, and instantly sparked of a fashion - mauve was a colour every fashionable lady in France must wear! In England, after Queen Victoria was seen wearing mauve at her daughter's wedding in 1858, mauve also became the colour sensation that women of taste had to be seen wearing in England.

William Perkin had become rich and he retired at 36 to devote his life to good works. This is definitely not the end of the story, however. What William had done by his chance discovery was to unleash a whole world of colour dyes. Mauve, made from the alkali found in coal tar called Aniline, was only the start. Many more colours made from aniline dyes were discovered and consequently produced by others eager to follow in Perkin's footsteps - violets, blues, reds, greens - all exquisite, brilliant and beautiful, all far cheaper than the animal and vegetable dyes used hitherto. Even women and men with a more modest purse could now afford to dress in eye-catching colour, so much so that a pedantic French historian is on record as remarking on how insufferable was the glare of the strollers in Hyde Park!

The story continues - Perkin's researches also produced the simulated smells of rose, violet, jasmine and musk. Men and women could smell, as well as look, good. But, more important, his chance discovery greatly affected the advance of medicine. At the start of the nineteenth century, doctors and scientists had no idea that bacteria caused illness. It was the French man, Louis Pasteur, who first made this link. By the end of the nineteenth century, the German chemical industry was manufacturing many synthetic coal tar dyes. Robert Koch was able to use these dyes to stain and to see hitherto invisible microbes. He identified the germs that caused anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera.

William Perkin Another German, Paul Ehrlich, started experimenting to see if coal tar dyes could be swallowed and used as 'magic bullets' to kill specific bacteria. Gerhard Domagk, a follower of Ehrlich, discovered that a red dye called Prontosil killed the Streptococcus microbe that causes blood poisoning when he tested it on mice! His own daughter suddenly became dangerously ill with blood poisoning after pricking her finger with a dirty needle. Domagk had no choice - he gave his beloved daughter the Prontosil, as yet untested on humans. She rapidly recovered - although her skin turned an interesting shade of red for a time!

Exquisite colours, beautiful smells, great medical advances - all of these started with the chance discovery of the colour MAUVE.

For more details of this fascinating story visit http://www.chemheritage.org/EducationalServices/chemach/cssb/whp.html or perhaps you would like to read the book: 'MAUVE ~ How one man invented a colour that changed the world' By Simon Garfield. Why not buy it from Amazon now! http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571209173/qid=1099001999/sr=1- 1/ref=sr_1_10_1/202-5950152-8479825